I disagree with your words on cheaper hardware. Vista makes your computer slower and buying more "iron" only makes the effect less noticeable. When something ge

I disagree with your words on cheaper hardware. Vista makes your computer slower and buying more "iron" only makes the effect less noticeable. When something gets so much slower, people what to get something in return. What is it that I get back in return for all that eaten RAM and CPU cycles? I do not run Aero. I do not see any new features or significant imporvements that justify extra 512MB of RAM Vista needs. Just read this sentence out loud: Absolutely "empty" Vista PC with no applications running is consuming about 400MB of RAM. Sure some of it is disk cache and I do not have exact numbers that 400 breaks down to, but that is not the point. To do any kind of work you'll need about 1GB of memory. Isn't it insane? Especially since XP is doing great on machines with 256MB RAM of memory? Enough about RAM. How would one explain that after you turn your PC on, Vista spends about 10-15 minutes doing crazy amount of disk I/O on various system processes/services. What is it doing? My Vista laptop (very powerful T60p) needs to just sit and "calm down" for like 10 minutes after I turn it on. Now do the math: Vista is not cheap. And on top of that you'll have to buy 1 more GB of RAM and (probably) more powerful video card. And wait 10 minutes after power on. And tolerate DRM and annoying security popups. But why? What for? Where is it what I pay dollars and my time for?